No surprise here, thousands of potential jihadis came through the al Qaeda camps during the late 1990s. But what is interesting is that the hijackers wanted to go to Iran before hopping the border for jihad in Afghanistan. This suggests that the word on the jihadi streets is that Iran is definitely a player and supporting al Qaeda and the Taliban in at least some limited fashion.

What's also interesting is that they wanted to go to Afghanistan. My experience is that Turks are much more likely to try to go to the Caucuses for jihad than Afghanistan. Since Chechens are ethnically Turkish, that's the logical place to go.

The last thing worth mentioning is that they met in college. Can we please put the terrorists are the downtrodden meme to rest?

Fox News:

One of the hijackers of a Turkish plane received training at an Al Qaeda camp and wanted to be flown to Iran so he could eventually join Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, the state-run Anatolia news agency reported Monday, citing police.

Authorities didn't say at which Al Qaeda camp 33-year-old hijacker Mommen Abdul Aziz Talikh, an Egyptian of Palestinian origin, received training....

The two hijackers [Talikh and Mehmet Resat Ozlu of Turkey] had met in northern Cyprus a year ago and were living together at the same house for a month, police said. Ozlu was registered at the literature department of a university in the breakaway Turkish Cypriot state in northern Cyprus, Anatolia said.

Police said that during their interrogation the two suspects confessed that they wanted to divert the plane to Iran and travel to Afghanistan to join the "jihad."

Posted by: Rusty at 12:29 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 279 words, total size 2 kb.